We are in the process of migrating our Citrix 4.5 x86 Windows 2003 R2 farm to a brand new, Windows 2008 R2 XenApp 6 x64 environment. All is going swimmingly well...until a couple of departments remind us that they have some old apps that are vitally important to them they'd like including in the new deployment. All this after they forgot to mention it in the initial systems analysis and only two days before go-live....the lack of communication is an issue I'm not looking for advice on.
The issue I am concerned with is how to get these apps into the new environment. Naturally, they won't install on x64 servers or 2008. Because we're using XenApp 6 we can't join either MPS 4.5 or XenApp 5 servers to the farm, which would have been handy as we could have built an x86 server and published these apps on it. So I thought I'd fire up another server, install the Citrix Streaming Profiler and virtualize them as streamed applications to the new environment. No dice there either. The first of these problem apps uses a huge set of patches that have to be deployed through a vendor-specific patching tool, and this causes the profiler to crash. Same with the second app - it uses some strange installer procedures and the profiler fails when running it. So I am kind of at a dead end. The only other thing I can think of is using App-V, but I'm worried that this will a) put me back a few days as I learn how to use it, and b) could possibly fail in the same way as the Citrix Profiler solution. There's also the problem of learning how to integrate XenApp 6 and App-V, which I am sure can be done but which I have no experience of. Either way, it seems a bit tricky. Does anyone else have any bright ideas that might help out? Could I use RDP connections to a virtual x86 server with these apps on and use Terminal Services to "publish" applications in the same way as Citrix does, without the hassle of the incompatible farms in Citrix? Or is there some better way of virtualizing application access, or indeed any other way I could achieve this in the small timeframe I have been left with? All ideas, hints, tips and suggestions are gratefully accepted. TIA, JRR -- "On two occasions...I have been asked, 'Pray, Mr Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
